Yesterday was so beautiful! The weather was perfect for working outside so I decided to make some photograms. A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The result is a negative shadow image varying in tone, depending on the transparency of the objects used. Areas of the paper that have received no light appear gray. I spent the morning walking along the paths around Lala with my mother-in-law. We collected and documented the various plants growing wild, and brought our specimens back to the cabin.

Friday, July 30, 2010

This morning we excavated the bones of a bluebird that I buried last summer. The bird crashed into the large window pane in the great room at Lala Lodge and died instantly. We buried it in an ant hill so they could pick the bones clean. It wasn't exactly what I expected (I had to dig a little more into the bird than I wanted to), but in the end there they were...tiny bones to be used at a later date...

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Monday, July 19, 2010

This is the collaborative multimedia project I did with the kids from WIRE (Wilmington youth center for Inspiration, Recreation, and Education), a Communities in Schools program. The workshop was held in conjunction with Wilmington's first annual puppet festival. We created our puppets using air dry clay, and allowed each character to evolve. As we worked, we bounced around ideas for our shadow play and discussed conflict resolution as a possible theme. We talked about West Side Story, a movie set in New York City in the mid-1950s, that explores the rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks, two teenage street gangs of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Taking our cue from the many extended dance scenes in the musical, we decided to do a shadow play in which our birds challenged each other in a dance off. The music was all performed live by the students. Enjoy and adjust your volume as necessary.